Nothing about Gettysburg was what I expected

At the Gettysburg National Military Park, our guide was Dave Richards, a native Pennsylvanian, descended, he said, from a Hessian soldier who deserted during the Revolutionary War and decided to stay behind.

Good choice.

An ardent student of Gettysburg history, Richards has over the last forty years accumulated a library of some 2,000 volumes on the subject and those of us on this Excursions Unlimited bus trip were to benefit from his passion.

Gettysburg was not what I expected. There was not a vast cemetery with row upon row of tomb stones. The entire town was involved in the famous battle.

With Southern dead removed to their home places and containing remains of 3,500 Union troops, the actual burial site where Lincoln delivered his 272-word address at its dedication is a mere 17 acres adjacent to what is now the main attraction, a well-preserved battlefield.

In 1947 I had wept over the graves at Vicksburg and just a few months ago, struggled with controlling my tears at Arlington.

Here on this bucolic countryside that resembles a golf course, I tried to make sense of the waste of young manhood that took place here as Richards described the various military units and how this one attacked that one and this charge came out of those woods and that retreat began when.

It was too much.

I was looking at a lush green meadow where men had tried to annihilate one another on the first, second and third days of July 1863. I tried to imagine the battle where 70,000 CSA Troops clashed with a 93,000 Union force, charging through cannon fire and smoke, the screams of men and horses, the blasts of guns and clatter of metal on metal.

It was a war unlike any other this country had ever known and this battle that took place 149 years ago ended with a horrific loss. The official brochure states “Total casualties killed, wounded, captured and missing for the three days of fighting were 23,000 for the Union and as many as 28,000 for the Confederate Army.”

Dana Willis, our most capable bus driver, maneuvered the narrow road around the battlefield as Richards pointed out that monuments had been placed as close as possible to the actual positioning of participating units, so that Southern memorials are on one side of the battlefield opposite Northern monuments.

Most memorials to troops of the Confederate States of America are modest except for the one built by the state of Virginia which chose to honor its favorite son with a monumental work by F. William Sievers and it was obvious that special care had been taken in its placement.

Cast in bronze, Gen. Robert E. Lee, West Point class of 1829, commander of CSA troops sits astride his favorite mount Traveler and faces East across the battlefield to Little Round Top where as sculpted by Henry Kirke Bush Brown, Union commander Maj. General George Gordon Meade, West Point class of 1835 surveys the situation from his vantage point on his faithful horse Old Baldy. Both men graduates of the same school, now enemies.

As we listened to Richard’s lecture, tourists around us chatted and posed for pictures on this lovely summer day.

Surreal to think of death in these calm and peaceful surroundings.

Whether one remembers this time in our American history as The Civil War, The War Between The States or The Great Unpleasantness, a visit to Gettysburg is a strong reminder of man’s ability and determination, right or wrong, to fight for one’s beliefs.